Previous affective recognition technologies have primarily been used in studies such as recognition of different types of emotions (e.g., pleasure, sadness and fear) based on the different affective recognition (e.g., voice and face). However, most methods cannot recognize and quantify the same type of affective recognitions in terms of the level of pleasure (i.e., extremely pleased vs. relatively pleased) or the scope of pleasure.
In the field of cognitive psychology, affective experience is measured by presenting pictures of different types of emotions to a subject. The level of pleasure is measured on a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 being the most pleasant and 1 being the least pleasant. The subject selects the level that best depicts the affect induced by the pictures. This method can be used to quantify an emotions of the subject, which is influenced by the subjectivity of the subject with a certain level of uncertainty.
Studies have shown that, the visual stimulation of positive emotions, such as joy and happiness, induces pleasant emotions, indicated by the expansion of the diameter of the pupils of the subject. In contrast, the visual stimulation of negative emotions, such as sorrow and fear, induces unpleasant emotions, indicated by the contraction of the diameter of the pupils of the subject. Therefore, the expansion and contraction of the pupils of a subject serves as an objective indicator of changes of emotions of the subjects.
Affective disorder primarily is characterized as moodiness, deficiency of pleasurable feelings and feeling of depression. Currently, auxiliary scales (such as the Beck scale and the self-rating affective disorder scale) have primarily been used for the determination and estimation of affective disorder, and brain waves and eye movement indexes are also used in determination estimations; however, these determination and estimations are not directly associated with the affective experience due to the shortage of affective indexes directly associated with mood. Therefore, the recognition rate and accuracy of affective injuries is not high. The affective width describes the affective change, and the positive affective bandwidth will be remarkably narrowed, thereby decreasing the affective change range and deficiency of the affective experience induced through external positive emotion information in the case of gloomy mood and the deficiency of pleasurable feelings. Hence, mood disorders such as the deficiency of pleasurable feelings and black moods can be induced. However, affective deficiency will induce negative cognitive schema, resulting in negative cognitive deviation to external information. This tends to perform cognitive processing in the negative psychology for non-negative (positive or neutral) visual stimulation. Therefore, experiences and affective disorder of a normal person are different from external positive and negative affective stimulation such that the positive emotion experience of the affective disorder is smaller than that of the normal person.